Pharrell Williams

The Neptunes partnership with Chad Hugo and the group N.E.R.D provide important context, but the solo releases form their own recording sequence. In My Mind arrived in 2006, placing rap, singing and a range of guest encounters within the same album. Can I Have It Like That with Gwen Stefani and That Girl with Snoop Dogg show different ways of arranging the exchange.

The guests are part of individual recordings, rather than a substitute for a central musical perspective. Williams’s interest in a spare, recognisable instrumental idea gives the songs continuity even when the vocal character changes. A brief rhythmic gesture can do more work than a densely filled arrangement.

Happy emerged through Despicable Me 2 in 2013 and became central to G I R L in 2014. The song gives handclaps, a clear pulse and a lightly delivered refrain enough room to carry its direct emotional proposition. Its twenty-four-hour video extends that idea through many separate people occupying the same song. G I R L also includes Marilyn Monroe and Hunter, offering a wider range of melodic and rhythmic settings than the best-known single alone suggests. The record places the singing firmly at the centre while retaining a producer’s attention to the space around it. Williams’s most persuasive work often sounds easy to enter because the arrangement has already made so many careful decisions: where the bass appears, which vocal answers the lead and how little needs to change before the next phrase feels new.